The woman waved her clipboard as the crowds grew around her. Flapping away on the exhibition floor at the ExCeL conference center in east London, she sounded irritated: a key person was missing, no one was lining up in an orderly fashion and it was well past time to start. As it turns out, organizing a robot parade is as difficult as herding cats.
This was ICRA 2023—to the uninitiated, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Robotics and Automation—a major robotics conference featuring luminaries from Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert to cybernetics art critic Jasia Reichardt and body-double avatar maker Hiroshi Ishiguro, as well as startups, students, and inventors showing off their creations. Though everyone visiting ICRA had days to wander the booths looking at every robot set to take part in this parade, the appeal of seeing them stomp about en masse had gathered hundreds of attendees. The organizer with the clipboard shouted the robot wranglers into position, found the missing luminary to grand marshal the parade and cleared the aisles for the procession.
Just as the show was about to begin, a random man carrying a box stepped up to a robot and kicked it over before scurrying away, his motivation obscure; the robot was quickly set right. The parade began to march. Many looked like smaller versions of Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog—the four-legged one with backwards knees you’ve probably seen on YouTube—but those w.
